Vail Mountain Outlines Huge Potential Lift Upgrades in Updated Forest Service Masterplan

Vail's goal is to “continue operating at less than full capacity, but add lifts and lift capacity where needed … to maintain a high-level ski experience”

Vail Mountain looks ahead to avoid falling behind

Vail Mountain is already a banger, 18 high-speed lifts and a pair of gondolas serving 5,317 acres on a 3,500-foot vertical drop. It’s the nation’s fourth-largest ski area, and the second-largest (after Big Sky), that doesn’t require a gondola ride between stapled-together former ski areas (Park City and Palisades Tahoe).

But, looking around, the U.S. megaresort standard is rising fast. Big Sky has pumped tens of millions of dollars into high-capacity, high-tech lifts, and it’s planning more. Deer Valley’s planned 3,700-acre, 16-lift expansion will transform the ski area into the fourth-largest in America. Steamboat just added a huge experts-oriented expansion and cleaned up its base area with a second gondola.

Perhaps reacting to this rapidly evolving skier landscape, Vail Mountain recently amended its 2018 Forest Service Master Development Plan (MDP), to emphasize out-of-base movers and high-capacity lifts. Under the revised plan, which the Forest Service recently accepted, Vail Mountain could add its first two eight-place chairlifts, upgrade four high-speed quads to six-packs, build two all-new front-side lifts, boost capacity on the Eagle Bahn Gondola, and ditch that short Mongolia Bowl platter for a 1,575-vertical-foot high-speed quad. Here’s a summary of Vail’s lift fleet, and how it could evolve at full build-out under this MDP amendment:

Here’s an annotated look at the proposed frontside changes (while the Cascade Village replacement is identified as a fixed-grip quad on this document, tables elsewhere in the MDP amendment describe it as a detachable lift. Elsewhere [page 9], the document suggests Cascade could be a six-pack):

The mountain’s current frontside trailmap, for context:

And here’s the annotated backside upgrade plan:

And the current Back Bowls trailmap:

And Blue Sky Basin, where no lift upgrades are planned:

But these plans, ambitious as they are, are not “intended to increase visitation,” the amendment reads, from what Vail Mountain calls its “manage-to threshold” of 19,900 skiers per day. “The goals of Vail are to continue operating at less than full capacity, but add lifts and lift capacity where needed in order to improve circulation, ease congestion, spread skiers out, more fully utilize underutilized terrain and keep wait times at key lifts and during the morning staging period at a comfortable level and, therefore, maintain a high-level ski on-mountain experience for guests.”

This goal echoes Vail Mountain sister resort Breckenridge’s 2022 masterplan ambitions, which outlined several big-time lifts that would make the resort “better not bigger.” Vail Mountain, the amendment states, “is unique in the ski industry in that the resort’s [comfortable carrying capacity] is purposefully higher than typical winter daily visitation.” While Vail’s official CCC is 23,260 skiers, the mountain had, as of last November, not exceeded the “manage-to number” (basically a handshake between the mountain, town, and Forest Service) of 19,900 skiers “in the last several seasons,” according to The Colorado Sun. Vail Mountain has managed that feat while, according to the amendment, still averaging 1.6 million skier visits over the past five seasons, surely one of the highest numbers in North America.

Vail Mountain, the flagship resort of American skiing’s flagship company, will always be Vail Resorts’ most important property, at least symbolically. No matter how big they make Park City and no matter that they own Whistler and no matter what they buy in Europe. This is where Pete and Earl looked into the wilderness and said, “by gum let’s build a ski resort here.”* The mountain accounts for one in 10 skier visits in the state that accounts for one in four U.S. skier visits. Most people’s ski story includes a Vail Mountain chapter. What happens when they force their way over the mountains into that little valley matters a lot.

Vail Mountain seems committed to making the average skier experience a good one. The amendment also outlines minor trail additions, mostly to improve skier circulation; 235 additional acres of snowmaking coverage; and a bunch of facility and restaurant upgrades that I’m not going to bother describing. All of these projects, of course, like any lift or snowgun or building in any ski area Forest Service MDP, are conceptual and would still have to pass through an approval process that makes the Manhattan Project look like a junior high school science fair submission. But let’s take a deeper look at the proposed changes, and what they would mean for Vail Mountain and its skiers:

*Those were probably not their exact words.